


saltwater kiss

by venndaai



Category: Dishonored (Video Game)
Genre: First Kiss, M/M, Period-Typical Homophobia, Post-Low Chaos Ending, mute corvo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-20
Updated: 2015-11-20
Packaged: 2018-05-02 12:40:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5248577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/venndaai/pseuds/venndaai
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They said the sea could help you forget.</p>
            </blockquote>





	saltwater kiss

 

  


He was so heavy, when Samuel put him on the raft. Samuel will always remember that, remember the strain in his arms when he dragged Corvo's long body down the inn's back stairwell, every sense on high alert, waiting for someone to pass by, to see, to notice Corvo's shallow, shuddering breaths. He will remember the body slipping out of his grip, Corvo's skull, banging against the step with a painful sharp crack, and Samuel's own body freezing up, a full-body wince that went on too long. He wasn't concerned for himself, not really. He just kept thinking of Corvo, washing in and out of consciousness, unable to make use of any of his deadly skills. It would be so easy to just cut the man's throat. Samuel supposed he should be glad Pendleton didn't want to stain the floorboards.

The raft- he couldn't dignify it by calling it a boat- was not especially watertight, and when he laid Corvo down the Lord Protector's matted hair floated in the bilgewater. Samuel had seen far too many drowned men in his life, and for some reason in that moment he felt a terrible unreasoning conviction that Corvo was dead after all. He pressed his ear to Corvo's chest, and listened for the whistle of breath. The sound was comforting, and he let himself stay like that for a while, awkwardly folded over, in the chill and cold, until he had the strength to get to his feet and push the raft out into the slow-moving river.

He knew he should go, but he couldn't move until the raft was out of sight. “Good luck,” he muttered, and wished for the steadying puff of a pipe.

His own boat he turned upriver. The little motor sounded unreasonably loud in the empty morning. And it was empty, without little Emily's chatter, without Callista's tired “Good day to you, Samuel,”s, and without Corvo's silent, undemanding presence. The emptiness wrapped around Samuel, insulating him from fear. He kept his head low as he skirted around the Hound Pits Pub, and raised it again once he'd passed under the bridge.

There was a shack under the third bridge, right before the Legal District, that the sailors and bargemen often used when their wives and landlords kicked them out. Samuel found it empty, and spent the day's long hours cross-legged on the jetty, smoking and trying to fill that empty, aching space in his chest.

The sun sank below the towers of the city, its last rays sparkling orange on the Wrenhaven, and then the sky burst with red; Callista, sending up the flare. The ache gripped Samuel's lungs tight, then, and didn't relax until Corvo clambered into his boat, dark coat and dark hair and night-dark mask all soaked in river-filth and other people's blood.

“ _All I can say is that it’s been a pleasure serving with you. Maybe after all this is settled, we’ll see each other again. Good luck, Corvo. If anyone deserves it, you do.”_

He read the rest of the story the next day at noon, in a special edition of the Sunday paper, bought with a pouch of good tobacco from a floating newsagents. The short, unshaven man owned a little dinghy filled with newspapers and magazines, moored to an island in the center of the river. He hawked his wares to the passing river traffic, and seemed to do a brisk business. Samuel knew his face well, had shared a few words with him once a week for the past three years. “How does it do you, Sam,” the man called across the green waters in a friendly greeting, and Samuel maneuvered the Amaranth closer. “Special low price on the Sunday news, in honor of the Empress's restoration, hey?”

And so it was cheap, soggy print that told Samuel that Corvo Attano had survived the lighthouse and secured his little Empress on her throne. He sighed, and closed his eyes, the river moving beneath and around him, and thought, _maybe. After it's all settled. Maybe._

 

* * *

 

Samuel Beechworth went to sea to forget. He wasn't the first and he wouldn't be the last. The navy men sang songs about it late at night, when the officers weren't around and the endless ocean was dark and cold.

It wasn't the life his father had wanted for him, but it was good enough for Samuel, and far better than the walls of the Abbey. Samuel had nothing against the Overseers, and he tried to obey the Strictures as much as a simple sailor could, but he'd known even as a child that the Abbey was no place for a man with neither ambition nor fervor.

The faces in his memory were eventually blurred by time. Once there was a woman, ill, lonely, with sad, shadowed eyes. Once there was a man with a smile like the sun. But he was glad to forget the details. He was glad to forget the emotions that accompanied them.

Samuel remembered the bare facts. He knew that when was eighteen, life on land became untenable. He married, to allay certain suspicions, and then he went to sea. The ocean gave his wife money for medicine until she died, and it gave Samuel something to fill the gaps in his soul with.

He saw the strangest things, out there, to the far north and south, out where land became a fever dream and all that existed was the crash of the waves against the sides of the ship and the weird songs of the whales. Out there, everyone dreamed of loves they could not have and lives they could never live.

And when he came back he was old and a widower. Plenty of old whalers with no family.

Samuel had never thought he was anyone special. He wasn't part of any grand story. All he'd ever wanted was to get along as best he could. That, he thought, was all most people wanted.

In the end he drifted back to the Hound Pit Pub. Callista was there. She had reopened the bar, and there were people inside, drinking and laughing, almost like they had before the plague. Cecelia darted from table to table, still worryingly skeletal but with a new energy in her small frame. Samuel hung his hat on the hooks by the door, and made his way through the crowd towards the bar, where Callista was cleaning mugs with her usual efficiency. She saw him, and favored him with a rare smile. Samuel smiled back. He carefully picked a stool and sat, leg muscles aching, cramped from hours in a boat.

He thought the nervous tension would keep him on edge, but instead he was drifting off, his grip on his beer slackened, when someone sat down on his right. The Lord Protector always could move with unnatural quiet.

Samuel opened his eyes. “Oh,” he said. “Hullo.”

The corner of Corvo's mouth moved upwards, just a little, and the lines around his brown eyes, clearly visible in an uncovered face, crinkled in the smallest of smiles.

Samuel glanced around. “Do folks not recognize you here?”

Corvo shrugged, as though to say, _If they do, they pretend that they don't._

Samuel leaned on the bar. He was, all of a sudden, at a loss for words. He'd never been very good at them, but now they were eluding him entirely. How did you tell someone you were very happy that, despite all odds and sense, they weren't dead? He'd already used all his words, back at the lighthouse, all the ones that had any meaning, anyway.

 _This place looks good._ Corvo signed slowly, movements exaggerated for Samuel, who had only learned the minimum of signs in his years at sea, and who no longer had Lady Emily for daily lessons.

Samuel nodded. “It does. Callista's done a fine job.” He looked over. “Say the Outsider's name, here she is.”

Callista put a glass in front of Corvo. “I remember your usual,” she said, businesslike. She poured herself a glass, from a long, narrow bottle.

They drank together, a bubble of silence in the noisy room.

“I imagine you can't leave the little girl on her own for too long,” Samuel said.

Corvo nodded. _I have to go. But I'll be back._ He finished his drink, and pushed it across the bar, and stood. Samuel knew Corvo had more old scars and bad joints even than Samuel did, but he never moved like it. Samuel stared at the rings on the counter, and started when a gloved hand touched his shoulder. He turned.

 _I'll be back,_ Corvo's fingers said.

He closed the door so quietly that Samuel barely heard it over the background noise. He let his head droop until it rested on the counter. The ache had spread from his lungs to his forehead. When he looked up Callista was watching him, with eyes far too sharp for Samuel's comfort.

 

* * *

 

He dreamed of Corvo in the bilgewater. The motion of the dark hair in the water turned into storms at sea. Then he dreamed that someone had tied a string of bones up above him and they were clacking in a strong wind. When he opened his eyes, the night was perfectly calm.

His small structure outside the pub had survived, and it was wear he slept, still. Now, he stood, bones aching, muscles complaining, and went and sat on the dock. The Wrenhaven was still as a millpond, and the moon reflected on its mirror surface like a pool of spilled milk.

He wished Corvo was there, sitting beside him. He didn't know much about the Lord Protector, but he knew the man liked fishing, and smoking. It would be nice to do those things with him. It would also be nice to just sit, in the night air, and try to make out some of the stars through the Dunwall haze. It would be nice to rest his tired head on Corvo's solid shoulder.

“Oh,” Samuel whispered.

 

* * *

 

They said the sea could help you forget. Once upon a time, there was a man who Samuel did not wish to remember, so he gave himself to the Navy and the hissing steam of ships and to the endless dark waters that circled the world. Eventually the memories faded. It took more than eight years to drown them completely.

It would take twice that to forget someone like Corvo Attano. Samuel’s bones ached in the rain, and his lungs wheezed when the smog lay heavy on the Wrenhaven. He doubted he had enough years left.

 

* * *

 

 _Hello_ , Corvo signed, the way he always did, brief, abrupt, hand movements big for Samuel's benefit but held close to his body like a shameful secret.

Samuel knew about secrets. He patted the dock, and Corvo sat down next to him.

The man wasn't wearing his usual long coat and vest getup. No gold trim, either. Just someone's thin but clean white shirt, a little small on him, and baggy trousers, reaching down to his ankles. Samuel realized he had never seen Corvo's bare legs. He wondered how hairy they would be. The hair on Corvo's arms was thick and fine, except in places where it was interrupted by the thick white raised lines of scars. Corvo's fingers were long, and Samuel imagined they had once been elegant, before they'd been broken, healed crooked and broken again.

Samuel wasn't a poet, and he wasn't much of a romantic, either. He had few words, and fewer actions.

“Cold out here,” he said. “I've got half a bottle of jack in my humble shack, if you'd like...”

Corvo nodded.

There wasn't really enough room in the shack for two full-grown men in heavy coats and heavier boots, but when he pressed his body against Corvo's side they were both hidden from both pub and pier. The oil lamp was burning low and didn't illuminate much. What light it gave off glimmered in the inky darkness of Corvo's eyes.

Samuel reached out. Touched the back of Corvo's hand.

This would be enough, he thought.

Corvo turned, and his hand closed around Samuel's hand, and then his other arm moved and there were fingers touching Samuel's lips, light as a feather.

He swallowed. “Yes,” he said. He was hyper aware of the movements of his mouth under Corvo's touch. “Yes. Please. I-”

He hadn't had much time or space in his life for kissing, and the people he had gone to bed with now and again had not been very good at it. Corvo was very good. Samuel didn't like to give rumor attention, but he couldn't ignore the thought that Corvo probably had gotten a lot of practice with the old Empress, rest her soul- it made sense, then, that Corvo kissed like a knight from an old story, one hand resting on Samuel's back, the other cradling his jaw. Corvo's mouth moved like he was kissing his Queen and not an old boatman with a white beard and dry, cracked lips and an ancient coat that smells of mud and salt.

 _So which one of us is the greater fool?_ Samuel wondered. _Him, for indulging a useless old sailor? Or me, for letting this man turn my head like I'm a young lady from a novel and he's not- well- everything that he is?_

Then there was space. Corvo wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and then his arms went back around Samuel's chest and he buried his face against the hollow of Samuel's neck and breathed, heavily.

Samuel held him. Like holding the world. Gristol and Morley and Tyvia and Serkonos, all of Pandyssia, the entire endless encircling ocean, from the tips of the waves to the sunless depths, all folded up in Samuel's arms. People who thought the dark, mute Lord Protector a hollow shell, they couldn't be more wrong. Samuel held on, and focused on the sensations, tight-wound rock-hard muscles under his hands, the smell of whatever expensive palace soap someone was putting in Corvo's washroom these days lingering in Samuel's nose. He wanted to remember this.

Then Corvo was moving, Corvo was touching his chest, his face, his hands, and there was no room for remembering, there was only feeling, and doing, in the dark, their loud breaths mingling, crowding out the lapping of the river at the dock, the skittering of rats across the courtyard, the carousing of barflies in the Hounds Pit, the faint rolling, booming sound of foghorns in the distance. Corvo's palm rested on Samuel's chest, beneath the layers of cloth, and Samuel felt his heart thud against his ribcage, and the lantern's light drew Corvo's face in glimmering golden lines, revealing an expression of such reverence that Samuel had to close his eyes against it, close his eyes and pull Corvo closer, hoping that together they could for a while keep out the passage of time and the continuing entropic decay of the universe, here in this warm darkness where Samuel was safe and free.

  


 


End file.
